Hypocrisy and Humour in the English Reformation

Abstract

This article examines jokes about religion, particularly religious hypocrisy, in early modern English jestbooks, from the 1520s to the 1740s. It argues that over the course of England's Long Reformation, we find more and more jokes in which the solution, or alternative, to hypocrisy is not a more robust faith, making the inward heart correspond to one's outward show of religion, but rather a more profane Christianity, making one's outward face correspond to an all-too-human and worldly heart. Jokes about religious hypocrisy thus betray both a deep anxiety about piety, and the emergence of a profane species of Protestantism.